20181205.0430

On 1 December 2018, Larry Hufford's "Democracy's Dark Side Triggers Fear among Young Adults" appeared in the online San Antonio Express-News. In the article, Hufford, Chair of the Department of International Relations at St. Mary's University, argues that the current political situation in the United States has even the most eminent youth afraid for themselves and for their society. He notes a need to develop a society in which people can feel safe with one another, noting that the honors students he teaches fear any number of things that they see in their daily lives and presented in major media and pointing out through them that there are deep undercurrents of anxiety and uncertainty about the future, even in those to whom people look for hopeful future. Hufford comments that developing healthy relationships is necessary to enacting the kinds of social change that will help to allay the kinds of fears gnawing in the breast, and he lays out a loose method for doing so. He concludes with a call to action on behalf of those who are now young and who are yet to be.
Prof. Hufford is not wrong to note that there is much fear underlying the daily actions of the kinds of student he teaches; I was that kind of student, though not in his classes or at his institution, but I recall some of what I felt then. (I was in class when 9-11 happened, and I walked out of the classroom into a world of many fears; I should have been more aware of them before, but I was forced into that awareness then.) I remember being afraid for myself and my place in the world, and as I learned more, I grew more worried and more afraid, for I learned more and more of the shaky, sordid foundations of much that I saw others around me holding dear. And, in many cases, I reacted with anger to that fear, lashing out at those near me and shaking my fist at the heavens that the world is as it is and not as it ought to be.
In some ways, that anger has not left me, though I am far better now than I was then at directing it towards what deserves to have anger aimed at it. There is much that merits anger, to be sure, and it inheres in many of the students' fears that Prof. Hufford relates. But I think he is perhaps overly naïve to think that building healthy relationships with those who enact such things as the students fear is possible. I think he is perhaps too hopeful for the spirit of humanity, at least within the scope of any lifetime. Perhaps across generations, such a change might arise as he calls for, and such changes are worth working toward, but I do not think him wise to think that such must be the first response to the way the world is now.
There is much that deserves anger. There is much that must be corrected, some that must be excised, before the work of building up can be done. No sound structure can be made on shaky foundations, after all, lest it topple and, in its fall, work to more ruin than had been eased by its building. Prof. Hufford does less well than he might not to speak more to that than he does; it is a necessary thing if the better world he envisions his students making can ever come to be.